Fordham University - Maroon Yearbook (New York, NY)

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Street life along the riverfront of New Amsterdam in 1689. or speeches and Father Murphy, a handsome and cheerful dyspeptic, pronounced judgment and gave them advice. Father Murphy succeeded Father Chazelle as President of St. Mary’s in 1840 when the latter went to Europe. In 1840 Father John Larkin joined the Kentucky community. Fie was an Englishman who had sat under Lingard at Ushaw with Cardinal Wiseman as a fellow pupil. He had travelled widely in Europe and Asia, joined the Sulpicians in Paris and had been sent to the Grand Seminaire at Montreal where he quickly became a celebrated professor of philosophy. But Father Larkin too had felt the same mysterious urge which brought Father Thebaud from Names to Rome. Although an honored teacher and a famous orator in both French and English, this imposing scholar became a novice in a Kentucky wilderness. A year later one of his best pupils, William Gockeln, a huge and masterful Prussian, another future president of Fordham, followed him to St. Mary’s. Like his master, Father Gockeln was a giant in size, in physical energy and mental capacity. Like several other members of the community he spoke four languages fluently and read several more. Still another recruit, Father Charles Hippolyte De Luynes, added distinction to the little college. Of Irish descent, he had been born and educated in France, and was persuaded to come over the seas by Bishop Flaget. These and others who were to play principal parts in the dramatic struggle of the Catholic Church in the United States found a common life at St. Mary’s. St. Mary’s was for them a proving ground for their scholarship, their vocation and their character. In this remote school, with pupils who required as much physical as intellectual discipline, hampered by poverty, lack of books, great distances from centers of culture, often the victims of bigotry, they were tested against the time when the crisis would be more severe and the issue more important. They became a corporate body, strong in their unity of purpose, clear in their aims. In his memoirs Father Thebaud left a record of his days at St. Mary’s that must, indirectly at least, reflect the opinions of his fellows. It is a record chiefly of opportunity seized. In Kentucky the Jesuits examined with eager curiosity American Anglo-Saxon institutions, slavery, the predominantly agricultural folk-way. They visited the Louisiana territory, with its still flourishing Creole culture, and studied the procedure in New Orleans schools. Politics, local history, the psychology of the American Protestant, reading habits of the middle class—all the social phenomena of frontier life absorbed their spare hours. They spent what we would call a rural exile learning about America, not the America of the cities, which even in those days were politically and socially corrupt, but the America of the Middle Border, the half way point between the north and the south, the east and the west. S Father Thebaud's first year at St. Mary’s (1839) was not a very active one. He attended English classes with the boys, walked through the woods, helped with the novices. Assigned to teach the natural sciences, he had immediately begun to prepare for his classes. At the same time, he was studying American democracy, reading English books in the library and refreshing his knowledge of theology and philosophy. As he felt more at home he resumed his writing, which was less an occupation than a delight. He poured out his recrim-

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Father W illiam Stack Murphy), Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and Mathematics, ihe Classics, French, Spanish, Astronomy and Drawing. Classes in oratory, a dramatic society, a manuscript journal called Juvenile Jocus (sic) and other means of entertaining and instructing- the vigorous and irrepressible frontier youth had been instituted. On pleasant afternoons the woods resounded with the eloquence of Kentucky Ciceroes fulminating against the British and proclaiming the virtues of George Washington. Primitive outdoor stages witnessed the presentation of melodramas like Winterton Moreton, or The Refugee, and Elphinstone, or the Pseudo-Assassin, written, directed and staged by Father Chazelle, on feast days and national holidays. Fhe mixture of the classics and Kentucky was not accomplished without difficulty. Fhe students created more than intellectual problems for their teachers. They occasionally drank and sometimes carried on feuds. Wilderness youth did not lake kindly to French discipline. Gay and hearty, very much impressed by the learning and piety of their Jesuit professors, they lacked the preparation necessary for a classical education. Hence the classical part of the curriculum was whittled away to the vanishing point. But the students compensated for this inadequacy, to some extent at least, by a passionate love for the poetical and oratorical literature of sixteenth and seventeenth century England. They enjoyed giving declamations. On national holidays such as February 22nd, July 4th. or on commencement day, student orators fascinated their parents and themselves with bursts of elocution. This encouraged but scarcely astonished their French preceptors, whose day-books were written in precise renaissance Latin. St. Mary’s College declined in numbers, from one hundred sixty-one in 1836 to thirty in 1846, but it did hat e a measure of success. A large percentage of the six hundred seventy-five students who attended the college won more than ordinary success. Governor Proctor Knott of Kentucky, Attorney General Garland and Assistant General Montgomery of President Cleveland's first cabinet, members of the distinguished Clark, Pope, Shelby, Garrand and Breckinridge families, several judges. Archbishop Spaulding and a large number of clergymen were graduated from the school during the Jesuit regime. St. Mary’s boys might have lacked some ol the graces which their professors considered desirable in college students, but they had boundless self-confidence and a natural gift of expression. Oratory was born, not made, in Kentucky. “Whenever the graduates of St. Mary’s appear in European society they are accepted as gentlemen,’’ wrote Father Thebaud many years later. He insisted too that “St. Mary’s was in no way inferior to the non-Catholic colleges of the west in point of learning and culture.” Perhaps the truly astonishing thing about St. Mary’s was the faculty which it assembled. They came together from the four winds, by apparent accidents which cannot be explained save by the ancient proverb, “God writes straight in crooked ways.’’ A very distinguished group of men, taken as personalities, scholars and priests, assembled at this backwater’s college. There was Father Thebaud, scientist, philosopher, litterateur and prudent man of business. William Stack Murphy, a future Vice-President and Prefect of Studies at Ford-ham. was an accomplished preacher and literary man. Fhe brother of the Bishop of Cork and of a famous member of the English and Irish bar, Father Murphy was a man whose personality teas as stimulating as his stock of stories was inexhaustible. Students affectionately remembered the days when they read him their essays St. Isaac Jogues, first Jesuit to set foot in what is now New York City, landing at New Amsterdam in 1643, after a Year of captivity and torture at the hands of the Iroquois.

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inations against the miserable North American climate and suggestions on horticulture and animal husbandry. When he spoke English fluently lie explored the surrounding countryside. His description of the Mammoth Cave, translated by Father Murphy, was one of the first scientific accounts of that wonder of nature. Since by this time the faculty was increasing more rapidly then the student body, Father Thebaud had time to be alone with his ideas. The American scene came into focus. Thumb-nail biographies of notable persons, questions, criticisms, predictions went down in his notebooks. Like his brother Jesuits, he had an enormous appetite for experience. There would be time to chew the cud later. He longed to know his new country more thoroughly and to interpret Catholicism to its inhabitants. He planned books, articles, letters. These plans were temporarily shelved, however, when he became president of St. Mary’s in 1845. ft was not until twenty years later that Father I hebaud found leisure to write his three important works, The Church and Gentilism, The Church and the Moral World, and The Irish Race, the last of which became a standard work of reference. Disaster seemed inevitable in the very first year of Father Thebaud s presidency. Although the college had been improving scholastically and, in the last four years, had attracted students from cities as distant as New Orleans, it was withering away from lack of support. Numbers were declining, possibly because of competition from the Episcopal College at Bardstown and the new Jesuit school in Louisville. Another reason for its failure was the inexplicably unsympathetic attitude of Dr. G. I. Chabrat, Co-adjutor bishop of Bards-town. At all events Father Thebaud was officially ordered to close the college. The announcement of the decision shocked and saddened the Catholics of Ken-t ucky. The whole Jesuit community, now numbering forty-seven, sixteen priests, eighteen scholastics, thirteen coadjutor brothers and four scholastic novices saw their project buried in the graveyard of noble experiments. They had dug their own gardens for food, milked cows, read by homemade candles, conducted a college at the rate of six dollars a semester for a student; they had View of New Amsterdam about flic time of the opening of the first Jesuit School in New York City in 1(183.